New Category of Derailment Discovered

With the help of the Chicago Transit Authority, Ten90 Solutions LLC has identified a new class of derailment, the Low Speed Stair Climb derailment.

Engineers, scientists, and operating personnel working with Ten90 in examining the new class of derailment proposed a tentative explanation through the formula: Vt =( (s)/(Aa)) - Hb, where Vt is the vertical travel, s is the speed of the train, Aa is the angle of attack and Hb is the height of the bumping block.

Ten90 scientists are developing simulations of various vehicles operating at various speeds striking bumping blocks of various heights in order to determine thresholds and limits that can be used to predict the likelihood of this type of derailment. For some obscure reason, known only to a very few, the critical threshold has been tentatively identified as the Giraud-Mollen limit.

Meanwhile, wire services are reporting:

(AP) Senator Charles Schumer and Richard Blumenthal, sometimes known collectively as the Schumenthal, announced today that the US Federal Railway Administration will undertake an intensive investigation into the operating practices, personnel selection, salaries, elementary school report cards, and eating habits of all those associated with the Chicago Transit Authority after today's derailment of a CTA Blue Line train at its final station in O'Hare (known by those named Daley as 'O'Hara') airport.

The investigation will be called Operation Stair Climb and will involve investigators from FRA, NTSB, FTA, FBI, NEA, CDC, BLS, BEA, FRB, and the NSA (who will only be there to eavesdrop on everybody else).

Senators Schumental stated, "We suspect there is a bad apple and we call on FRA to get rid of everybody associated with apples because we know one bad apple spoils the barrel so FRA should get rid of all barrels and mandate that, instead of barrels, inward and outward audio-video recorders be installed on all escalators so we can have something really cool to look at on YouTube when this happens again.

We also recommend that FRA outlaw the use of bumping blocks, an obsolete technology, that interferes with the quality of the video when trains attempt to set new 'most stairs climbed' records."

When Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois objected to the Schumenthal's announcement, pointing out that the Schumenthal does not represent Illinois, he, Durbin, does, the Schumenthal called for an investigation of Senator Durbin.

A reporter, for an obscure railroad epublication pointed out that FRA has no authority over transit operations not connected to the general railway system, but Joseph Szabo, agency administrator was ready for that one. "Such legalistic points are remnants of a 19th century paradigm that values "silos" "limited powers" and other archaic formulations when in this new 21st century reality, everybody, but particularly FRA, is everybody else's partner and partners only mean well, so let's not get hung up on technicalities."

Officials of the CTA were quoted as welcoming the assistance of their government partners in helping them to overcome the obvious deficiencies in their safety culture that overemphasized stopping the train no matter what prior to engaging the bumping block.